Science News

All the latest stories on newscientist.com: whale chasing, Rosetta selfie, sight improved with stem cells, porcupine-inspired surgical staples, and more

Check out these photos of a combination sundial-moondial dating to the 12th century that was discovered near Rostov, Russia. Archaeologists say the markings on the artifact correspond to positions of the sun and moon thr...

Stem cells, with their ability to develop into many different types of tissue, have long been touted for their promise in regenerative medicine, yet treatments have been slow to develop. But now, a small study found that...

For this week's podcast, we've dug up an old podcast that we published last year (originally published July 24, 2013). For those that missed it, the podcast covered the physics behind a world like Westeros: the setting f...

The unassuming rock goby, a small fish that can be found in rock pools around the United Kingdom, southern Europe and North Africa, is a master of camouflage, a new study finds.

Depending on whom you ask, e-cigarettes are either a great tool to get people to quit smoking or another way to get people hooked on nicotine.

Scientific American senior editor Josh Fischman joins nanoscience researchers Shana Kelly, Yamuna Krishnan, Benjamin Bratton and moderator Bridget Kendall from the BBC World Service program The... --

The ancestors of modern-day kangaroos, giant marsupials with rabbitlike faces, may have walked upright on two feet, sans any hopping, a new study finds.

Synopsis: Proton longevity pushes new bounds -- Are we closer to solving the meaning of life? World's longest neutrino beam seeks to find out why our universe exists -- Upgrade set for dark-matter detector -- Scientists ...

The Rosetta spacecraft has captured a comet selfie, adding to its impressive collection of images as it orbits comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The European Space Agency's Rosetta mission consists of the orbiter, which w...

If you are one of the 200,000 people who signed up for Mars One's ambitious program to colonize the red planet, here is something that might make you reconsider the decision. According to a study conducted by a team of g...

The second health care worker in Texas to contract Ebola lived alone and had no pets, Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings said Wednesday. The unidentified woman tested positive for the deadly virus after caring for an Ebola patie...

Hurricane Gonzalo continued on its path toward Bermuda on Wednesday with sustained winds of up to 125 mph, the U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami said. The Category 3 storm could become even stronger throughout the ...

They had faces like rabbits and some were 2 metres tall, but the oddest thing about extinct relatives of modern kangaroos is that they walked just like us

In 1978, Louise Joy Brown made human history as the first "test tube baby" ever born after her mother underwent a revolutionary fertility treatment known as in-vitro fertilization (IVF). In the following decades, several...

The second health care worker to test positive for Ebola should not have traveled on a plane from Ohio to Texas the day before she showed symptoms of the disease, the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Preventio...

Along with the usual suspects, cigarettes and booze, the European code for avoiding cancer has been updated to include having the HPV vaccine and breastfeeding

Zip past obstacles at 160 kilometres an hour but without risking life and limb - the immersive sport of first-person video drone racing makes it possibleStomach-dropping speed and stunts are the norm in first-person dron...

The catastrophic 1934 drought is one of the worst North America droughts on record, and was caused, in part, by an atmospheric condition that may have led to the current drought in California, a new study finds.

A health care worker who tested positive for Ebola flew on a plane the day before she developed symptoms of the deadly disease, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced today.

Why are scientists still interested in the heaviest fundamental particle nearly 20 years after its discovery? “What happens to a quark deferred?” the poet Langston Hughes may have asked, had he been a physicist. If s...

A wrist-scanning MRI could fly to the ISS to monitor astronauts' bone health in microgravity, as well as helping people in far-flung parts of Earth